mHealth apps usability may not be all they are chalked up to be, particularly in the realm of patient engagement and chronic disease management.
In a data brief issued by the Commonwealth Fund, researchers describe how most mHealth apps usability have low design quality, making them significantly unusable for several patients.
The researchers, supervised by Urmimala Sarkar, MD, MPH, performed an observational analysis utilizing the 11 high-rated diabetes, depression, and caregiver apps. The group inquired twenty-six patient and caregiver participants to complete a set of activities proposed to demonstrate the app usability.
Overall, these apps indicated important interface design issues. The buttons were not huge enough for sufferers, and most applications lacked instructions for convenient navigation.
The applications also lacked contextual data elaborating to patients why certain data entry points were primary.
Limited patient education mostly keeps sufferers from completely understanding their chronic sicknesses, thus keeping them from full engagement. When the tested applications didn’t explain to diabetics why they might need to review a past meal, the applications kept those sufferers from entirely understanding the implications of their illness.
The applications also presented various data entry and retrieval complications. Most of the apps needed extensive data entry, inquiring users to input several pages of data points. On average, sufferers were only capable to get about halfway through the data entry prompts without expert help. Many sufferers also reported unclear explanations of what information the app needed.
Sufferers also reported problems with data retrieval, like data about upcoming doctor’s appointments or consultations. On average, sufferers completed 79 out of 185 tasks without help.
In the end, the researchers recognized 2 huge obstacles to app usability: a deficiency of patient confidence with technology, and poor app interface design usability.
The researchers cited 2 potential solutions to these issues.
“To harness the potential of mobile applications, developers might require engaging a diverse set of sufferers in the design and testing of their products,” Sarkar and coworkers wrote.
“Additionally, the applications should be capable to remind users of the rationale for each task and should integrate information from other sources, like pharmacies, to decrease the requirement for manual data entry,” they sustained.
Not only the mHealth apps usability are very low, but research indicates that many of them are also unsuccessful at empowering patient engagement. In accordance to researchers Karandeep Singh and David Bates, MD, most mHealth apps usability fail to fulfill 8 central sectors of mHealth patient engagement.
These factors included offering educational data, reminding or alerting consumers, recording and tracking health data, reflecting and summarizing health data, giving guidance deployed on user activity, enabling communications with contributors and family members, offering support through social networks, and motivating behavior change in rewards (like a points system).
Singh and Bates discovered that most applications fell into one of 2 categories: educational applications or engagement applications. Educational tools best suited sufferers with lower levels of engagement and who were merely initiating to learn about their conditions.
Engagement applications were better at reminding and prompting sufferers, and gave little data about chronic illnesses. These applications were better suited for the already fully engaged sufferer.
Overall, it is a long road ahead for mHealth app developers, but professionals say the road is worth it. When developers consult sufferers about usability requirements and take into account significant aspects of patient engagement, their programs can show promise.
“Chronic disease self-management and promotion of patient engagement are necessary to victorious care management programs targeting sufferers with high requirements and high costs and are linked with improved quality of life, functional autonomy, and decreased hospital use,” Singh and Bates described.
“Mobile health applications are designed for smartphones can assist to empower high-need high-cost sufferers to self-manage their health.”
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